Discover the benefits of document properties

Old-style figures
The advantages of what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processors over typewriters are manifold, but on the aesthetic level one of the most striking is the proportional spacing of letters.

Before this column gets bombarded with corrections, it is true that IBM had been making machines with some degree of proportional spacing since 1941 but the technology was neither commonplace nor, for the average user, affordable.

Proportional spacing makes text far more elegant and legible, but there is still a place for monospaced fonts ­ those with a fixed width, at the same point size, for all characters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces.

One obvious example, which you’ll see on the Hands On pages is in programming language or Dos commands.

It’s much easier to count characters, distinguish spaces and copy such text accurately when monospaced and, whereas a typo or spelling error is forgivable in normal text, programming code is usually zero-tolerant of faults.

You’ll also often find that some monospaced fonts, such as Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, have a dot or a slash in the zero to help distinguish it from the letter O.

Much business word processing involves columns of figures and, unless these line up vertically they’ll be difficult to follow and cause severe distress to accountants.

For this reason, most fonts have monospaced numbers, which are also cunningly designed to keep the same spacing when bold ­ so you can, for example, embolden a sub-total without upsetting the vertical alignment.

You’ll also find, that the numbers in, for example, Times New Roman or Arial are the equivalent of all-caps ­ each number is the same height and none project below the baseline.

These ‘lining’ numbers again help in presenting neatly tabulated figures in financial reports or invoices but free-range numbers, such as a date in text or a page number don’t need such constraints.
It’s here that ‘old style’ numerals work best.

They also have ascenders and descenders, like ordinary lower-case letters, and consequently a rather more elegant appearance.

To get the choice of lining or old-style numbers in the same font means purchasing ‘expert’ or ‘pro’ fonts, and the vast majority of fonts that ship with Windows or common applications contain lining numerals.

However, there are a few honourable exceptions. Georgia, which comes with Windows XP and Vista, Candara (Vista and Office 2007) and High Tower Text (Office 2007) all contain old-style numbers and the last also has a splendid upper-case Q that spreads its tail under the following letter.

OO bookmarks
In a previous column, we stated that Open Office doesn’t have a way of making bookmarks visible, though you can access them using the Navigator.

The Open Office community must have taken this to heart, as developer Rup Xamqon has written an extension called Visiblebookmarks.

When active, this tags each bookmark in a document with a margin note, showing the bookmark’s name and anchor text.